September 30, 2014

Brandon M. Beatty

Web Designer & Developer

Tao Zhang

Digital User Experience SpecialistPurdue University Libraries

Nicole Kong

GIS SpecialistPurdue University Libraries

Christopher Charles

Project ManagerHABRI Central

for HUBzero

A GeospatialSearch Component

HUBbub 2014

Intro

HABRI Central

• www.habricentral.org• Built upon HUBzero platform• Open access resource hub and community for

research on the relationship between humans and animals

• Library of audio, video, documents, articles, and datasets

• Community features– Forum, Groups, Wiki– Events, Jobs, Members

Intro

Motivation

• Users expect to find information near specific locations

– Events– Jobs– Organizations

• Build better user community – member information on a map is more engaging than a list

• Visualizing information– Distribution of members, events, and jobs– Distribution of specialties (veterinary medicine,

psychology, sociology, etc.)

Design

GEO Search

• Use member profile information, events, jobs, and resources contributed by users

– Geocode user location information in member profile using Google Maps API

– Geocode new entry on-the-fly– Users can also manually input location information

• Map displays all information on startup– Users use search to narrow down information items

on map– Search within a radius of a location

• Search scope– Members, Jobs, Events, Organizations– Tags

The Interface

https://habricentral.org/geosearch

Map Display

Filter Results

HUBzero Tags

Add one or more associated tags

Tag search is inclusive (“AND”)

Resource Type

Narrow down results to at least one category

Location

Define search radius in miles or kilometers

Enter a name of place, location, or zip

Distance between Lat/Long points

Spherical Law of Cosines

$R * ACOS(COS(RADIANS($lat1)) * COS(RADIANS(lat2)) * COS(RADIANS(lng2) - RADIANS($lng1)) + SIN(RADIANS($lat1)) * SIN(RADIANS(lat2)))

$R = 6371 kilometers

3956 miles

$lat1, $lng1 = center of place, location, or zip

Filter Results

Results

Summary

• Initial user feedback– Information overview and visualization– Discovery tool– Easier to connect with other users with similar

interests

• Users more willing to contribute information to HABRI Central

– Demographic information– Tags

• GeoSearch as a HUBzero component